Regimes fear their demise in devastation's wake

By Naomi Klein

17 May 2008 — 10:00am

The rulers in China and Burma fret that the disasters there could unleash an equally mighty force: people power.

WHEN news arrived of the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan, my mind turned to Zheng Sunman, an up-and-coming security executive I met on a recent trip to China. Zheng heads Aebell Electrical Technology, a Guangzhou-based company that makes surveillance cameras and public address systems and sells them to the Government.

Zheng was determined to persuade me his cameras and speakers are not being used against democracy activists. They are for managing natural disasters, he said, pointing to recent freak snowstorms. During the crisis, the Government "was able to use the feed from the railway cameras to communicate how to deal with the situation and organise an evacuation. We saw how the central Government can command from the north emergencies in the south."

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Of course, surveillance cameras have other uses too — such as helping to make "Most Wanted" posters of Tibetan activists. But Zheng did have a point: nothing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or disorganised, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It's something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on the planet — China and Burma — struggle to respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the regimes — and both crises have the potential to ignite public rage that would be difficult to control.

When China is busily building itself up, residents tend to stay quiet about what they all know: developers flout safety codes while local officials are bribed not to notice. But when China comes tumbling down, including at least eight schools, the truth often gets out. "Look at all the buildings around. They were the same height, but why did the school fall down?" demanded a relative in Juyuan. A mother in Dujiangyan told The Guardian, "Chinese officials are too corrupt and bad … They have money for prostitutes and second wives, but they don't have money for our children."

That the Olympic stadiums were built to withstand powerful quakes is suddenly of little comfort. Previously it was hard to find anyone willing to criticise the Olympic spending spree. Now posts on mainstream web portals are calling the torch relay "wasteful" and its continuation "inhuman".

None of this compares with the rage boiling over in Burma, where cyclone survivors have badly beaten at least one local official, furious at his failure to distribute aid. There have been reports of the Burmese junta taking credit for supplies sent by foreign countries, and in some cases taking the aid. According to the Asia Times, the regime has been hijacking food shipments and giving them to its 400,000 soldiers. The generals, it seems, are "haunted by an almost pathological fear of a split inside their own ranks … if soldiers are not given priority in aid distribution and are unable to feed themselves, the possibility of mutiny rises".

Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, confirms that before the cyclone, the military was already coping with a wave of desertions. This relatively small-scale theft of food is fortifying the junta for its much larger heist — the one taking place via the constitutional referendum the generals have insisted on holding, come hell and high water. Enticed by high commodity prices, Burma's generals have been gorging off the country's natural abundance, stripping it of gems, timber, rice and oil. As profitable as this arrangement is, junta leader General Than Shwe knows he cannot resist the calls for democracy indefinitely.

The generals have drafted a constitution that allows for elections but guarantees that no future government will have the power to prosecute them or take back their ill-gotten wealth. As Farmaner puts it, after elections the junta leaders "are going to be wearing suits instead of boots". The cyclone has presented them with one last, vast business opportunity: by blocking aid from reaching the highly fertile Irrawaddy delta, hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Karen rice farmers are being sentenced to death. According to Farmaner, "that land can be handed over to the generals' business cronies". This isn't incompetence or madness. It's laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.

If the Burmese junta avoids mutiny and achieves these goals, it will be thanks largely to China, which has blocked all attempts at the UN for humanitarian intervention in Burma. Inside China, where the Government is going to great lengths to look compassionate, news of this complicity could be explosive. Will China's citizens receive this news? They might. In the wake of the quake, the "Great Firewall" censoring the internet is failing badly. Blogs are going wild. If China loses the ability to control what people see and hear, neither surveillance cameras nor loudspeakers will help its rulers.